Art & Algorithm

Think about that. As designers, you’re accustomed to meticulously crafting every aspect of your work. You test and proof and press check. And yet the design team sent this job off to their print partners at Sandy Alexander knowing that the finished product was, for all intents, out of their control.

Freaky, yes (it’s disconcerting to not know how a major job will turn out). Creatively exhilarating, absolutely.

Disruptive Technology

Each of these 20,000 unique pieces of art were created through a combination of art and algorithm. The project challenged everyone involved—forced them to reimagine the creative process, to get comfortable with randomness and to cede control. It blurred the lines between design and art. And got them thinking in new ways about printing.

Ever since Gutenberg set the first metal type, printing has been a disruptive technology. It changed the world by distributing knowledge, wealth and power. Printing happened in largely the same way through the centuries until the early 1990s, when the first digital press, the Indigo, transformed the basic methodology.

The next big shift: Variable data printing, which meshes a database with a digital layout to create customized pieces. Designers can vary text and image in ways most commonly applied to direct mail. Instead of a letter reading, “Dear Valued Customer,” it reads, “Dear John.” Marketers create personalized catalogs stocked with pictures of products you’ve recently purchased. In the marketing world, VDP is used with intention and planning to ensure each version is correct and predictable.

We take it for granted that a marketing letter is addressed to us personally, and we may not even know that the catalog we page through has been targeted. The technology behind these print pieces is invisible—and also fascinating and powerful.

Two questions underlined the Quarterly team’s approach to this issue: “Can we leverage what’s cool about variable data printing to create art, not commerce? And can we get comfortable surrendering control over the predictability of digital printing?”

Print as Art

“It was a little scary—but also incredibly intriguing,” says Frederique Gravier, the designer at Hybrid Design charged with developing the piece and the algorithm behind it. As close as she was to the project, she had little idea how the finished art would turn out.

Here’s how it happened: Dutch artist Merijn Hos worked in Illustrator to create an intricate, dynamic image with 9 independent layers. Using an InDesign plugin called SmartStream Designer and HP’s Mosaic print technology, the design team worked with Hos to develop a set of instructions that drove each layer to change in certain ways— scale, swap, turn on or off, or shift position. The plugin can run endless variations, each creating a unique finished image. So the instructions become part of the art, an extension of the illustrator’s hand.

A New Way of Creating

The Quarterly team applied this thinking in two dimensions, letting algorithm and randomness disrupt their typical creative process. “It forced us to think about rough outcomes instead of final products,” he says. “It’s like having a child: You set the rules and instill certain values, but you can’t really control what the child does—they have their own will separate from yours. The best you can do is try to guide the outcome so it’s fairly close to what you want to happen.”

The designers ran several tests in-house, creating 20 or so prints at a time. “We were looking for variety and happy accidents,” Kozlowski says, “and wanted to like as many of the results as possible. We would go back and tweak the algorithm, playing the probabilities so we would get interesting outcomes as often as possible.”